Writing isn’t Just Writing

Key insight of Mise en place writing#

What’s true for chefs is even more true for writers. The actual act of writing is only the final assembly stage of a longer, more involved process. Instead of grocery shopping (or stocking up), chopping, measuring, cutting, peeling, and slicing, we have ideation, research, peer review, audience testing, reframing, illustration, organization, and more.

The key insight of mise en place writing is that we should decouple writing from pre-writing.

Writing is a focused process#

Writing is an intensive, focused process. It takes me anywhere from one to five hours to pump out an average article-- in that time I am doing nothing else.

That’s a lot of continuous-time dedicated to just one thing, which is rare in today’s attention economy. If I were to add to that ideation, research, organization, and so on, it’d take even longer, and I’d do a poorer job of it. Ironically, this is the stuff that actually has high leverage on what readers will take away from what I write. So, I should spend more time on that.